Hugh Cook: The Worshippers and the Way

"If you'd wanted to stay," said Hatch, "you should have been an Ebrell Islander. Go to the army. Do your seven years. It's a good system. You'll benefit from it."

This was obviously not the answer Atlantabara had been wanting to hear. Making no effort to hide his disappointment, he retreated.

Hatch watched him go.

Asodo Hatch had some sympathy for the young Frangoni warrior, but not much. It was a good system – breaking Combat College training to spend a few years in the real world. The system had long ago been forced upon the Combat College by the Silver Emperor, who had pondered the problem for the better part of a century before presenting Paraban Senk with an ultimatum.

Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control who ran the Combat College, was obedient to one prime and overriding imperative: train Startroopers! Train Startroopers for the Stormforce of the Nexus! The Silver Emperor could make that impossible by the simple expedient of placing guards at the lockway to kill anyone who tried to leave or enter. Negotiating from such a position of strength, Plandruk Qinplaqus was able to win considerable concessions from the Combat College.

Ordinary Combat Cadets studied straight through from age 11 to age 27, graduated as Startroopers and went out into the world absolutely useless for any practical purpose. After years spent training for the sanitized high tech warfare of the Nexus, they were unsuited for an army of leather boots which lived, fought and died in the dirt.

The Silver Emperor's Frangoni levies, however, were a different story. In early manhood they made their home in the armies of the dust for seven long years, and so could easily be integrated back into those armies when they finally graduated from the Combat College at age 34. By then, that was the only place for them to go.

The ranks of the Free Corps were closed to the Frangoni, who were regarded with contempt by the Ebrell Islanders of Dalar ken Halvar. And by age 34 they were usually strangers to their own people, having spent too long eating the bread of strangeness and living amongst those who have no caste.

Thus the Combat College produced for the Emperor an elite cadre of Frangoni officers whose greatest loyalty was to the imperial army.

Right now, as Hatch watched, the Emperor himself was touching a torch to the funeral pyre. It caught fire, and the flames began to consume the body of Hatch's father. With due ceremony, the Silver Emperor departed, and Hatch was left alone on the riverbank with his family. On this occasion, Plandruk Qinplaqus had made no contact with Asodo Hatch, for the ceremony had been held to honor the dead Lamjuk Dakoto, and not to honor his son.

While Hatch was still watching the flames of the pyre, he was accosted by Polk the Cash, a moneylender. Apart from Lupus Lon Oliver, there were two people in Dalar ken Halvar with whom Asodo Hatch found himself at odds. One of those people was Nambasa Berlin, who was not much of a problem as Hatch rarely saw him. The other, unfortunately, was Polk.

Polk the Cash was a moneylender, a man of the Pang; and it was one of life's great and inexplicable coincidences that Pang shared with Berlin the physical peculiarity of having no nose. Like Berlin, Polk had been born with a nose – but both men had been deprived of their noses in early adulthood. Furthermore, both had lost their noses under similar but unrelated circumstances, which was adding strangeness upon strangeness.

"You have something for me," said Polk.

"I do," said Hatch, with a studied politeness which would have made Paraban Senk proud of him.

Asodo Hatch had agreed to be a guarantor for a debt raised by his brother Oboro Bakendra Hatch, and Oboro had defaulted on the loan. So Hatch had to pay. So it was that, in accordance with his perception of his duty, Asodo Hatch paid up to Polk. Five scorpions. It was a lot of money for anyone to be parting with for no good purpose, and Hatch was by no means rich.

"Thank you," said Polk. "Any time you want to do business, come and see me."

"Maybe I will," said Hatch.

He had absolutely no intention of ever doing business again with Polk or any other moneylender, but had learnt long ago that it is best never to alienate anyone unnecessarily. The Teacher of Control alleged that a universal courtesy to the world in general is the cheapest of all good investments; and Hatch, after much experience of life, saw no reason to dispute this.

When Polk was gone, Hatch turned his attention to a ceremony which was taking place on the far side of the Yamoda River. It was being presided over by something which looked almost like a horse, at least from a distance. But Hatch had sharp eyes, and could pick the differences. The thing with four legs was Edgerley Eden, the guru who had enthralled his sister Penelope.

Hatch was distracted from the view by Onica's scream.

He turned in alarm.

But it was nothing – only a brute of a thog mauling some small white-skinned dog.

But Onica was screaming at the thog, and trying to hit it with a stick.

Hatch strode toward the dog-fight, grabbed the thog by the collar and heaved it over the riverbank. It tumbled down the bank and splashed into the river. On recovering itself, it found the bank too steep to climb, so paddled downstream through the shallow waters, and shortly found itself nose to nose with a large hog which was paddling upstream.

Hatch did not concern himself with the thog's further fate, but turned his attention to his daughter, who was cradling the dog. An elegant Janjuladoola woman with a small retinue was approaching.

"Is this your dog?" said Hatch, addressing the woman.

"It is mine," said the woman, she whom Hatch was destined to know as the Lady Iro Murasaki. "How is it? Oh…"

The Lady Murasaki found to her distress that one of the ears of her dog had been torn away. She said it would have to be put down. Onica begged for it.

"You can have it," said Murasaki, whose name was yet unknown to Hatch, "if you father agrees."

"It would be received as a welcome gift," said Hatch.

The Lady Iro Murasaki smiled upon Hatch, and she departed; and such was the brevity and simplicity of this their first meeting that Hatch thought nothing of it at the time. He thought rather of the expression of pain which he saw on the face of his wife Talanta. As Talanta had never been prone to any fears of infidelity on Hatch's part, Hatch presumed the pain to be physical in origin – and his presumption was strengthened by the fact that he had seen Talanta manifesting such pain at odd occasions in the recent past.

"What is it?" said Hatch. "What is it?"

"It is nothing," said Talanta.

But Hatch suspected that she might be seriously ill. He wished he could take her into Cap Foz Para Lash to be examined by the Combat College's cure-all clinic, but that was reserved for Combat College personnel; and the Combat College as a whole was off-limits to all outsiders at all times, except during the competitive examinations for the instructorship, when guests could be invited to spectate.

The pyre which was consuming the body of Hatch's father would burn for a long time, and the ashes from the body would be brought to Hatch in due course. He had no need to stay by the riverside any longer, and such were the demands of his days that he could ill afford to linger. With the essential part of the funeral well over, Hatch hired an ox cart to take Onica and Talanta back to the Frangoni rock, for it was a long and weary walk. He trusted that Talanta could make the uphill climb – far too steep for any ox cart – from the road to their house.

When Talanta was gone, Hatch lingered by the riverside for a little longer, torn between his need to get back to his training schedule in the Combat College, and by the fact that this was after all his father's funeral. They had never been close, but even so – the old man's death had come as a shock, even though there had been difficult times in the past when Hatch had felt that he could have cheerfully murdered the brute.